Digital lighting technologies, e.g. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
The Digital Multiplex (DMX) communication protocol is a communication protocol used widely in digital lighting networks. The DMX hardware specification defines RS-485 as the physical interface, and frame break as the start of frame (SOF) indicator. The DMX protocol contains few constraints, but defines a frame size of 512 data bytes (maximum) preceded by a one-byte start code. Other than the start code, the DMX frame content may be specified by the application designer. DMX may be used to send binary data to lighting fixtures, which may include show content and device configuration/settings.
It would be desirable to be able to take advantage of the flexibility of the DMX protocol, and DMX devices connected in a communication network which employs the DMX protocol, to support a broader and more flexible set of communication options.